Forgive my ignorance but i don't know what you mean when you ask if it tries to access the terminal.

If a program prompts for a password, it usually turns off the echo, so that the typed password isn't visible on screen. To do that, that program has to have some control over the terminal (for example xterm) that it runs it.

That's why it is so hard to remote-control programs like passwd and gpg.

But somehow I don't think that this is your problem, it's just something I encountered before in similar situations.